Matt Smith reviews the second episode of Elementary season 2…
Television used to be seen, and in some circles still is seen, as a distraction. Something we take in as almost a kind of sugary nourishment, full of nothing and only serving to take us away from our lives for a half hour to an hour at a time. And there’s of course the ads.
It struck me this week (as I’m a meta, fourth-wall breaking kinda guy) that I’m not entirely sure what Sherlock Holmes would think of his own TV show. Would he revel in the subject matter, or deem it unworthy of his attention? After all, it’s hard to imagine someone like Sherlock Holmes indulging in sugary LED nourishment unless it was purely used to tell a cute joke or an act of facetiousness on his part. He’d much rather be focused on a case.
Because Holmes is the kind of guy who stays focused on a job. Not just as a nine-to-five job. He doesn’t just take his work home with him. He plasters his work on the wall and stares at it three days straight.
And it’s that focus that makes me wonder how Holmes can grow as a character and still stay as Sherlock Holmes. That purity, his striving to find an answer above all else, is what makes the character who he is. Social niceties, relationships, everything that most people value can all be used as tools to solve a case, if you look at the character in a cynical light. That and Watson, who in this series of Elementary is starting to come into her own on cases. Which should make up for Holmes’ lack of normal levels of focus as he grows social tact and takes on cases that, at least so far, are beneath him.
Gone are Moriarty and the personal double crossings, the intelligence of a crime. The stresses and pressures Holmes puts on himself haven’t seemed to break him as opposed to washing right off him. The cases don’t have the same weight as the previous series. I don’t know if it’s just me, but they seem trivial in comparison. Like old Holmes, sharpness could possibly be lost and the potential for great work to be done isn’t fulfilled.
That’s not to say this week’s episode was a badly made episode. In fact, the cases are still far from simple, and I found myself figuring out what was going to happen along with the characters. But picking the assailant, or at least not being surprised by what comes next, wasn’t something that was ever a problem in series one.
This week merely featured a bunch of frame-ups as opposed to clever puzzles. One of the first suspects was in actual fact the person who did it. That along with the classic ‘I heard the news, I was shocked’ and ‘we have a suspect, oh wait he’s turned up dead’ scenes meant some of the major beats of the episode weren’t as revelatory as they should have been.
Instead of giving the viewers something insolvable unless you are Sherlock Holmes (but still letting us believe we could along the way), we’ve got something that doesn’t need Holmes.
Once again, not putting the previous series on a plinth, but there’s a lack of energy surrounding the introduction we’ve had from these two episodes. I dearly hope this series doesn’t become just another distraction and gets back to being as entertaining and puzzling in equal measure, indeed in equal measure also to the first wonderful series. It’d be predictable to carry on down the less entertaining road series two has started on. Give us something we don’t expect next week.
Matt Smith – follow me on Twitter.
Originally published November 6, 2013. Updated April 15, 2018.
